Marketing Strategy Examples for Beginners

  

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Marketing is used by all businesses to get customers for their products or services.  A marketing plan containing strategies serves as a road map to achieve their goals.  Most marketing strategies include product development, pricing, distribution, promotion and customer relationship management.

While most big companies already have their marketing strategies in their respective marketing plans, many small business owners, however, mistakenly confuse and continuously misuse the term “marketing strategy” with some specific marketing activities such as ad campaigns.  Well, to help shed light on these things a marketing strategy is an approach for marketing products and services. It is a plan containing a goal or goals and strategies that are aimed at achieving the goal or goals, and specific and detailed activities to carry out a strategy.  An ad or ad campaign is one of the specific activities by which marketing strategy is accomplished.

This would explain why we need to always carefully tie up our advertising efforts and other specific marketing activities to a comprehensive marketing strategy to get the attention of target customers.

In other words, without employing the appropriate marketing strategies, your business won’t achieve your goals or worse, will lose in the business competition.  No matter if your company is big or small, what products you sell or services you offer, marketing strategy is what ultimately determines your overall measurable success.  At the end of the day, marketing strategy determines the life or death of a business.

For small business owners, you don't have to worry on how to devise complex marketing strategies for your products.  Instead, you can create your own strategies based on the basic strategies that have already been proven. Here are some basic marketing strategy examples that will serve as your guide in determining what is best suited for your starting up business.

Product strategy

By setting a product strategy, you can determine the direction of your product efforts.  You can start creating your product strategy through these guide questions:

• What market problems you would like to solve?
• What product you are selling?
• Who are you selling to?
• What value do you provide your customers?

You must also need to understand the surrounding competitive landscape and try to identify how to differentiate your product and your business from your competitors.

Of course your goal is to sell your product and so you want to put your product at the top in the market.  So you must inform your target customers how superior your product is as compared to your competitors. You need to educate them of the benefits they get from your product.

The ultimate goal is to achieve your target market share. The best example of this is Microsoft Windows’ market dominance in the worldwide market share for computer OS.

Pricing Strategy

Basically, pricing strategy is based on the expense to produce the physical product or provide a service.  This is known as cost of goods which include raw materials and other costs like machinery, labor and administrative overhead in goods-production companies, or salaries and bonuses in service-provider companies. Other internal and external considerations should be evaluated in the final determination of product price.

Hence, pricing should factor in the following:

• Fixed and variable costs.
• Competition
• Company objectives
• Proposed positioning strategies.
• Target group and willingness to pay.

There are a lot of pricing strategies you can use in order to keep in the competition. Some of the most commonly used pricing strategies include high-low pricing, market-oriented pricing, cost-plus pricing, and competition-based pricing.  Each pricing strategy will focus on a main factor or specific factors that determine how much a certain product of service should cost.

Promotion Strategy

A product or service means nothing unless their benefits can be communicated clearly to the target market.  A specific or a combination of promotional methods is used to get the message to the customers’ attention.  Elements of a promotion mix may include print or broadcast advertising, direct marketing, personal selling, etc.  Well, these are the traditional approaches but these are still being use by some companies.  But this HubSpot survey reported that these traditional ways are getting less and less popular nowadays especially to the small businesses.

On the other hand, inbound marketing uses website, blogs and social media to make the promotional message heard across the target market on the internet.

Distribution Strategy

This is about how you will distribute your product. How will you sell your product and how will your target market acquire your product? Where your target market is?

For product-focused companies, this strategy involves identification of strategic channels for your product distribution so that your target market can buy your product.

In many cases, using several different distribution strategies can help a company maximize their connection to customers in order to put more of their product in the customer’s hands. 

• Direct Sales through a Sales Team
• Internet Marketing (inbound marketing)
• Wholesale Distributor 
• Value-Added Reseller 

Obviously, these are just but basics of marketing strategy examples intended to help those who are just starting up with their businesses. If want to know more about internet marketing or inbound marketing for particular, download this free eBook now.